Sleeping on Strangers
by Ell Roche
Summary: Kirihara never means to fall asleep on the bus, and especially not on a beautiful stranger who disappears before he can apologize! Who does that? Annoyed that she just vanishes, Kirihara vows that he'll find her. Imagine his surprise when he sees her at Seigaku while trying to spy on the men's tennis club.


**Title: **Sleeping on Strangers

**Pairing:** Kirihara Akaya/girl!Echizen Ryoma

**Summary:** Kirihara never means to fall asleep on the bus, and especially not on a beautiful stranger who disappears before he can apologize! Who does that? Annoyed that she just vanishes, Kirihara vows that he'll find her. Imagine his surprise when he sees her at Seigaku while trying to spy on the men's tennis club.

* * *

Just so the record is accurate, mind you, Kirihara Akaya would like it noted that the first time it happens, _she_ is the one who falls asleep on _him_. Her golden eyes flutter shut, and she slumps sideways until her head is resting on his right shoulder. Her green-black hair is pulled back in a long braid, the end escaping the back of a white cap. Her tennis bag is at her feet, and, obviously, the only reason he lets her sleep on him—the great Kirihara Akaya: Rikkaidai's first year ace.

"Brat," he mutters.

Even though she likely has less talent than a five-year-old playing with an adult-sized racket, she plays tennis. That's enough for him to tolerate her unforgivably rude breech of his personal space.

"Just this once," says Kirihara.

The stops speed past, one after the other, and she doesn't wake. Kirihara considers waking her more than once, but decides against it. It's not that she's beautiful, or that he likes the warmth of her against him or anything pathetic like that—it would simply be disrespectful to wake someone who clearly needs rest.

"You better be as tired as you seem."

So even though the next stop is his, and he's supposed to be meeting his senpai for a delicious sushi dinner, he doesn't move. He stays in his seat so that she can sleep, until he eventually drifts off himself.

oOo

The second time he sees her on the bus, Kirihara is exhausted. Sanada, his vice captain, is in the hospital. Yukimura, his captain, is taking it hard—harder than when Sanada watched over Yukimura back when they were still in middle school. The practices are vicious, extensive, and never when or where the team might expect them to be held.

Kirihara has spent the past two hours running up and down the stairs to a temple with the other regulars. His legs are made of stone, and his eyes are weighed down with weights heavier than the ones he constantly wears on his wrists and ankles to build up even more muscle mass. He's going to shine even brighter than he did in middle school, and show the world that he is the best.

"Eh, it's you," Kirihara says, when he realizes that the closest empty seat is beside the girl who had dared to sleep on his shoulder last week.

She stares up at him, somehow giving the impression that she's looking down on him, and says, "Who are you?"

"Who am I?" Kirihara snaps, ready to teach the brat some manners. But his body doesn't seem to be able to follow through with his mind's witty retorts. He collapses in the seat beside her, props his tennis bag against the window, and purposefully leans over and rests his head on her shoulder.

Tensing, she starts to pull away. "What are you—?"

"You slept on me last week, brat. So be a good pillow and pay me back," Kirihara mutters as he snuggles his head into her shoulder. What right does she have to complain? Not only does she owe him, but he's being a total gentleman! He could've been a creep and burrowed into her chest, after all.

"Che." Her tone holds amusement and mocking, but he doesn't care. Because somehow, she is very comfortable and smells good.

Kirihara sleeps.

oOo

Three days later, Kirihara knows that he looks like crap. The bags under his eyes have bags. Yukimura becomes more evil and vicious with every day that Sanada spends in the hospital. Soon, he fears that he won't be able to sleep at all. He's tired all the time, and eating seems to take too much effort. He knows he should eat. He does. But he just can't find the time or motivation.

"You look _terrible_."

Kirihara doesn't have to look to know that the person speaking, a girl, is talking to him. He looks anyway, because he can't stand it when people talk to him like that. All his life he's aimed higher, sought for greatness, and people have told him he'll never reach it. Kirihara's goal in life is to prove all of them wrong, and have fun while doing it.

It's the girl—the one who had dared to sleep on him. Her gold eyes mock him, but he's perceptive enough to see the worry there, too. He still has no idea who she is, or why she seems to care. "Why do you care?" he asks. It's a silly question, because she obviously doesn't. Unless, of course, she's one of his many fans. She doesn't seem the type, though. She hasn't begged for his autograph or tried to kiss him.

She glances at the tennis bag that's swung over his shoulder, lips pursed. "I don't. I just don't want you to fall over and break your rackets; it'd be a waste of quality work, judging by your pricy shoes," she says.

Kirihara slings the bag off his shoulder, leans it against the side of the bus, and sits beside her. "What do you know about quality?" he teases tiredly. Perhaps she isn't as bad at tennis as he had first thought. She is clearly smart enough to recognize good gear when she sees it, but then, most girls seem able to notice when others have expensive stuff.

She smirks and glances away, looking out the window. She mouths something, but he doesn't catch more than the words, "work on".

Kirihara yawns, puts his head on her shoulder, and closes his eyes. She still smells as good as she had three days ago. She's still comfortable. She hasn't smacked him or called him a pervert yet, and he's grateful for that. Perhaps she has some intelligence after all, either that or she pities him; he doesn't want it to be the latter.

"I thought we were even?" she says, more than asks.

"Then I'll owe you," he whispers, because it's the right thing to do. He had said that she was paying him back last time, and that made them even. He acknowledges this; Kirihara is a man of his word.

"Che." She sighs loudly, as if he's a great burden, and then nudges him with her shoulder. "Drink this. Don't want you dying of dehydration on me." He can hear the sound of zippers, assumes she's opening her bag, and then there's the pop of a sports drink opening and the coldness of a can in his hand.

Kirihara drinks it without comment, not even grimacing at the sickly sweet taste of artificial grape flavoring. The can slumps in his hand when he's done. She must take it back, because when he wakes up—bus driver telling him it's the last stop for the second time that week—the can is gone, and so is she.

oOo

This becomes a regular habit for them. They meet on the bus, one of them usually exhausted—okay, so it's always him after that first day—and she never complains when he snuggles against her and gets some much needed sleep.

The first time she shoves a bento at him and tells him to eat before he dies on her, Kirihara realizes that he might just be a little bit in lust with the hot girl on the bus. The first time she pulls a small blanket from her tennis bag and drapes it over him with a greatly put-upon sigh, he realizes he's a little in love with her.

And the first time he gets on the bus, and she's not on it, he realizes he might be a little dependent on her. The second time it happens, he realizes he never asked her name, and never gave her his name, and he has no way to track her down and find out if she's all right. The third time, and the fourth time, and the fifth time, and the sixth times, Kirihara wonders where the hell she went!

The seventeenth time she's not on the bus when he is—and no, he hasn't been avoiding it just because she doesn't seem to ride anymore; and no, he didn't ride the bus everyday until it stopped running just to see if she would show—Kirihara snarls, "She never even broke up with me! Who does that?"

He leans his face against the glass, even as the bus changes routes, and imagines how much he has to tell her when he sees her next. Because, dang it, he will find her. And when he does, his girlfriend owes him a million apologies for the ulcer forming in his stomach, and the shoddy couple of shots during his last few tennis matches—which he still won, of course.

Oh, and she also owes him her name.

oOo

When Kirihara wakes up to the bus driver calling him—by name now, how embarrassing is that?—he has a crick in his neck. He rubs it as he glares out the window. That never happened when she was here for him to sleep on. Never! It's totally her fault that he has a crick in his neck!

He steps down the stairs, off the bus, and onto the sidewalk. Kirihara can't help but laugh when he realizes that he's standing outside Seigaku's high school division. He flashes back to three years ago, when Seigaku came so, so close to beating them at the Kantou tournament, and again at Nationals. But, as always, Rikkaidai had emerged victorious.

"Might as well _spy_ for old time's sake," Kirihara says. He also makes a mental note not to tell his senpai he fell asleep on the bus and woke up at Seigaku again; that would be unbearably embarrassing. He's grown up a lot since he last did this, thank you very much!

Unlike last time, Kirihara knows where everything is. Rikkaidai had a practice match at Seigaku before the year started, and he paid attention to where he was going. So he walks around the school, and past the baseball field, and turns left at the row of clubhouses. Honestly, even if he hadn't remembered how to get there, the screams and cheers would've easily shown him the way.

"Ryoma-sama!"

"Tezuka-sama!"

The cries are a mixture of male and female voices, and are so loud that Kirihara is faintly surprised they aren't deaf yet. There's a mass of bodies pressing up against a tall, chain-link fence, gazes fixed inward.

"Oh? What's so interesting?" he wonders aloud.

Kirihara heads over to the gates that lead to the courts themselves. Seigaku's regulars are standing beside them, grins on their faces. Whatever they're watching, it must be good. He comes to a stop beside Momoshiro—the annoying idiot, because Fuji is on the other side, and Kirihara still struggles with ghosts of his shameful past around Fuji, on occasion.

Before he can ask the aggravating second year a question, he glances at the court and sees what has them so enraptured. Tezuka Kunimitsu, their captain, is playing a game of tennis against _her_. And she's _winning_. She's wearing the women's Seigaku uniform: a white jersey and a blue tennis skirt that is scandalously short on her. It flips up to reveal red shorts as she dives to return a volley.

She's laughing, and smiling, and looks so unbelievably happy that his chest hurts.

Tezuka's tennis has turned her into a radiant creature for everyone to see, and he hates it. He wants to blind them all and keep her perfection for himself. Because he was wrong. So very wrong. She's not a little kid with an adult's racket. She's captain of Seigaku's women's team—the team that beat out Rikkaidai's team to win Nationals last year. And she's only a first year.

How has he never heard of her? Who is she?

"Ryoma-sama!"

Kirihara glares at the fanboys who shake the fence, fingers curled through the loops. That is clearly, obviously, undeniably, her first name. And since Kirihara is _her boyfriend_, they have no right to address her so intimately. Envy the color of his eyes wells inside, and he has to fight back the demon that he's almost killed. It wants to surface and serve balls at every boy who yells her name, hitting them in the throat and silencing their cries.

"Shut up," he whispers.

It's match point, and they yell her name even louder than before. Love confessions, compliments, and offers for dates accompany it.

"Shut up," he says, as he battles for control of his conscience. "Or I'll shut you all up."

She—Ryoma—wins. As she throws her head back, laughter spilling from her mouth with delight, Kirihara shoves the gate open and stalks onto the court. He hears the Regulars gasp his name in surprise, hears the sound of them following him, but pays them no mind. He's not here to challenge their captain to another match.

He's here to claim what's his—Ryoma.

She's shaking Tezuka's hand when Kirihara comes up behind her and wraps his arms around her waist. He burrows his head into her neck and says, "It's so hard to sleep without you now. You're being cruel, Ryoma."

Kirihara smirks against her skin when Tezuka sucks in a breath and releases her hand, shock painted against his face.

"Che." Ryoma glares at him. "Not my problem."

"Oh, it is very much your problem, _Ryoma_." Kirihara stresses her name intimately and loves how silent everyone has fallen. _That's right_, he thinks. _Look and see that she belongs to me. She will not return your feelings or go on dates with you. This one is mine_.

"I got bored," she says.

And all right, that hurts. But after seeing how alive she was while playing Tezuka, he can understand. He should've offered to play her a long time ago. Maybe then she wouldn't have vanished on him. Maybe the challenge of great tennis, in addition to quiet companionship is what will snag her as deeply as he, himself, has been snagged.

"You could have asked," he says.

"You could have offered," Ryoma counters stubbornly.

This is where he went wrong. Luckily, it'll be easy to fix. "It's hard to invite you to matches at Rikkaidai if you skip our dates," Kirihara says. "But since we're both here, would you like to come over after school tomorrow and play?"

"Kirihara Akaya," Fuji says, voice low and lethal. His eyes are open, piercing Kirihara with fiery blue darts.

Kirihara spares him a brief glance, and doesn't miss the raw jealousy on Fuji's face; the other regulars share a similar expression. Apparently, he wasn't the only one to fall for her awkward charms. "Fuji."

Ryoma smirks and grabs Kirihara by the hand, dragging him toward her bag. She only stops long enough to put her equipment away, and misses how the regulars eye her with disbelief, and him with disgust, annoyance, rage, and jealousy. "It's your turn to buy lunch, _Akaya_," she says. She draws his name out so long that it's almost painful to hear. He's never let a girl address him so intimately before, but now that she's taken that liberty, he would never think of rebuking it. Especially not since it made everyone watching them gape and flinch. "I want cheeseburgers."

"And Ponta," he adds. One time he was actually awake enough to read the label before falling asleep on her.

"And Ponta," she agrees.

A wicked idea enters his head, and Kirihara peeks back at Tezuka before saying, "And then I can sleep with you." Tezuka's glare is beatific.

"Not a chance," says Ryoma.

Tezuka and Fuji smirk in unison; it's creepy. And Momoshiro's shoulders relax in an instant. Kaidoh stops hissing.

"You owe me, Akaya. It's _my_ turn to sleep on you," Ryoma adds.

The horrified looks on everyone's faces makes him want to laugh at them, because it's clear that no one caught the one word she changed from his statement—not even the genius Fuji.

"Whatever you want, Ryoma. Whatever you want," Kirihara says sincerely, and means it. She's life and light, and so interesting and talented that he can't bear the thought of not being able to see her whenever he wants. The bus trips without her had been hellish.

"Eh?" She grins up at him from beneath the bill of her cap. "I like the sound of that, Akaya."

So did he.


End file.
